Commercializing Azure Part 9 – Transitioning to Support

A Fortune 200 consumer packaged goods company recently partnered with CapTech to commercialize Microsoft Azure's Platform as a Service (PaaS) as an enterprise service offering. This blog is the ninth in a ten-part series of blogs. The purpose of this post is to highlight the activities involved in transitioning the new cloud service offering from the project team to full-time operations and support. It is intended for anyone interested in gaining insight into the major bodies of work and considerations involved in commercializing cloud services for large enterprises.

Recommended Bodies of Work

Below is a diagram that illustrates a high level and comprehensive view of the bodies of work with their relationships and dependencies. In the remainder of this post, we will explore what's involved in transitioning to support as identified by the items highlighted in green.

Transition to Support

This effort entails how Azure PaaS will be operated, supported, and maintained from a Day 2 perspective. The prerequisite to this effort is having the Governance Model defined. Depending on whether your enterprise chooses to have a centralized or federated governance mode, IT operations and/or the various business operating companies may be involved in answering some of the following questions for Day 2 operations. These questions include who, what, how, and when specific roles and responsibilities will be transitioned from the project team to relevant parties. Some groups within your organization may be well equipped to transition to a federated governance mode immediately. Other groups may need a transition period until they become comfortable with the cloud offering. Still others may never transition to a federated governance mode.

Foundational Documentation

Another prerequisite that will make the transition from the project team to operations are some of the foundational documents below. Below is a representative list of documentation that we provided to our client to help facilitate this transition. The list below includes guides such as design documentation, application development, and operations. This list also includes some how-to guides that describe some common scenarios that you might need to utilize. Lastly, it includes some useful reports that the operations team will probably need to monitor your cloud account both from a security and financial standpoint.

Organizational Impact

Commercializing Azure PaaS as a new service offering will surely have implications on the enterprise from a people perspective. What will this mean to your enterprise? Defining the Governance Model is a prerequisite to understanding the organizational impact. A suggestion is to pilot the governance model. This will allow you to gauge the size, scope, and complexity of anticipated Azure PaaS work coming down the pipeline in the next year. It will also help to determine whether the enterprise has the talent/resources trained and available to support the anticipated volume of work. After this analysis is complete, the insights and recommendations can be shared during the organization's people planning for next year's resource and staffing needs.

Conclusion

This ninth post in the ten-part series described transitioning support from the project team to the operations team of the cloud service offering in order to commercialize Azure with this Fortune 200 CPG client. These were just some of actions we took to help facilitate this transition. Your organization may identify other activities that need to occur to ensure this transition is smooth.